University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 2-2012 Syntax-Prosody Interactions in Irish Emily Elfner University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the Phonetics and Phonology Commons, and the Syntax Commons Recommended Citation Elfner, Emily, "Syntax-Prosody Interactions in Irish" (2012). Open Access Dissertations. 505. https://doi.org/10.7275/3545-6n54 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/505 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SYNTAX-PROSODY INTERACTIONS IN IRISH A Dissertation Presented by EMILY JANE ELFNER Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2012 Department of Linguistics © Copyright by Emily Jane Elfner 2012 All Rights Reserved SYNTAX-PROSODY INTERACTIONS IN IRISH A Dissertation Presented by EMILY JANE ELFNER Approved as to style and content by: _________________________________________ Elisabeth O. Selkirk, Chair _________________________________________ John Kingston, Member _________________________________________ John J. McCarthy, Member _________________________________________ James McCloskey, Member _________________________________________ Mark Feinstein, Member ________________________________________ Margaret Speas, Department Head Linguistics ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation could not have been written without the input and support from many different people. First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Lisa Selkirk. Her input and support throughout the last few years has been invaluable, and I couldn’t have asked for more in an advisor. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to work with her. The input from other members of my dissertation committee has also been formative both in the development of this dissertation and in other projects I have worked on as a graduate student, and it has been an honour to work with each of them. I’d like to thank John Kingston for his input especially on the phonetic and data aspects of this dissertation. I always left meetings with the feeling of having learned something valuable and useful. John McCarthy has been a great teacher over the years, and has taught me more than I ever thought I would know about phonological theory and about how to develop an analysis from beginning to end. Mark Feinstein provided me with helpful insights on data presentation, and I’m sorry that I didn’t have the chance to work with him more closely. A special thanks goes out to Jim McCloskey, who agreed to be on this dissertation committee despite living thousands of miles away. His encouragement for this work on Irish has meant a lot to me, and I probably would not have followed through with this project had he not convinced me that it was a valuable and worthwhile pursuit. I’d also like to thank Jim for arranging two visits to UC Santa Cruz, where I had the opportunity to discuss this work with faculty and students. iv Another group of people who are perhaps even more vital to this dissertation are the native Irish speakers who agreed to work with me over the years and have their speech recorded and analysed. Not all of the data I have collected has made it into this dissertation, but I am indebted to each of them just the same, as each recording session brings some new insight: Brigíd Bornstein, Michael Carney, Peggy Cloherty, Norita Ní Chartúir, Yvonne Ní Fhlatharta, Roitín Ní Fhlatharta, Fiona Ní Fhlaithearta, Breda Ní Mhaoláin, Áine Ní Neachtain, Máire Uí Fhlatharta, Baba Uí Loingsigh, and especially Michael Newell and Yvonne Ní Fhlatharta, who have met with me on several occasions. I am also indebted to those who have taught me Irish in a more formal setting over the last few years: Yvonne Ní Fhlatharta, Tom Moriarty (and everyone at the Irish Cultural Center in Chicopee), Michael Newell, and Máitiú de hAl. For support in various stages of this project including fieldwork in Ireland, I’d like to thank Ryan Bennett for being a great collaborator, friend, and host, Máire Ní Chiosáin for being incredibly generous and supportive during my trip to Ireland (including putting me in touch with native speakers), and the many Celticists that I have met at Formal Approaches to Celtic Linguistics in Arizona and the sixth Celtic Linguistics Conference in Dublin. I would also like to thank Patricia Shaw, Daisy Sewid- Smith, Berverly Lagis, and my fellow Kwak’wala students for an amazing summer field methods course at UC Santa Barbara during InField in 2008. This course was an incredibly formative experience, and helped me a great deal with the fieldwork for this dissertation. At UMass, I would like to thank faculty members not on my dissertation committee, as well as my fellow grad students, for making grad school a great v experience. Among the faculty, I would especially like to thank Kyle Johnson and Ellen Woolford, who have worked with me over the years on projects related to this dissertation, and Joe Pater, for many fascinating phonological conversations. I would also like to thank my classmates, Meg Grant, Jesse Harris, Misato Hiraga, Wendell Kimper, Pasha Siraj, and Martin Walkow, for getting me through first year and for being great friends and colleagues ever since. Thanks especially to Wendell, my fellow phonologist, for friendship and p-side support over the years. I’m also indebted to Leah Bateman, Noah Constant, Chris Davis, Karen Jesney, Seda Kan, Mike Key, Claire Moore- Cantwell, Kevin Mullin, Kathryn Pruitt, Anisa Schardl, Brian Smith, Robert Staubs, and many other grad students for both for their input and interest in my research, as well as contributing to making my time at UMass memorable. Finally, thanks to Martin, Pippin, Brian, Anisa, Snowflake, Gizmo, and Callie for reminding me about life outside linguistics. A great thanks to my parents, Susan and Paul, my sister Alison, my grandparents, Uncle Allen, and the rest of my family and Calgary friends for supporting my decision to pursue a Ph.D. in the distant land of Massachusetts. vi ABSTRACT SYNTAX-PROSODY INTERACTIONS IN IRISH FEBRUARY, 2012 EMILY JANE ELFNER, B.A., UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY M.A., UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Elisabeth O. Selkirk This dissertation is an empirical and theoretical study of sentence-level prosody in Conamara (Connemara) Irish. It addresses the architecture of the syntax-phonology interface and the relation between syntactic constituent structure and prosodic structure formation. It argues for a fully interactional view of the interface, in which the phonological form may be influenced by a number of competing factors, including constraints governing syntax-prosody correspondence, linearization, and prosodic well- formedness. The specific proposal is set within the framework of Match Theory (Selkirk 2009b, 2011), an indirect-reference theory of the syntax-prosody interface in which correspondence between syntactic and prosodic constituents is governed by a family of violable MATCH constraints. These constraints call for a one-to-one correspondence between syntactic and prosodic structure, to the extent that prosodic structure may be recursive under pressure from the recursive nature of syntactic phrases. However, this direct correspondence can be overruled by other interacting constraints, including vii prosodic markedness constraints and, as proposed here, other correspondence relations, as on the linearization of hierarchical syntactic structures. This dissertation argues that the distribution of pitch accents in Conamara Irish provides direct evidence for Match Theory. It is proposed that two phrasal pitch accents, L-H and H-L, demarcate the edges of phonological phrases, where L-H accents specifically target only those phrases which are recursive. Using the distribution of these pitch accents as indicators for the presence of prosodic boundaries, the dissertation investigates a variety of syntactic structures in both the clausal and nominal domain. It is argued that there is a close correspondence between syntactic and prosodic structure in default cases, but that this direct correspondence may be subverted in favour of a structure which better satisfies higher-ranked prosodic markedness constraints. Finally, this dissertation addresses pronoun postposing, a process pervasive in Irish dialects in word order appears to be sensitive to prosodic structure. This dissertation proposes to account for this phenomenon using the theoretical framework developed in the dissertation, in which the main patterns are accounted for through the interaction of MATCH constraints, prosodic markedness constraints, and a proposed violable constraint on the linearization of syntactic structure. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iv ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND........................................1 1.1 Introduction................................................................................................................1